Month: February 2017

Categories
Queer

Jeremy Zimmer #UTA

Jeremy Zimmer reprises his role as Beverly Hills community activist.  Yesterday afternoon Zimmer hosted a demonstration, an invite only demonstration (demonstrators were required to RSVP) in Beverly Hills.  Recruiting a host of Hollywood stars, their star makers and heavy hitting Californian politicians to speak for ‘our creative community’.  For his detractors,  Jeremy flexed his Hollywood muscle.  At the demonstration Jeremy Zimmer ostentatiously spoke out against President Trump and his immigration crack down.

This isn’t the first time Jeremy has thrown himself into the socially active stew.  Jeremy and UTA have a highly publicised yearly event where his staff are required to donate a day or so to help others in… the ‘community’.  Of course, a less fortunate community than the arts community to which Jeremy often refers.  Jeremy Zimmer has his photograph taken with black faces in the other… ‘community’.  Photographs that consequently appear in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

Jeremy held yesterdays demonstration in lieu of the UTA annual Oscar party.  Was scrapping the UTA Oscar party a HUGE sacrifice for Zimmer?  Um… no.

United Talent Agency is scrapping its annual Oscar party in favor of hosting a rally at its L.A. office and donating to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been on the frontlines of fighting the President’s executive order targeting travel from Muslim-majority countries.

They made a donation of $250,000 to the ACLU, Peter Eliasberg must be THRILLED.  Think about this.  Zimmer would usually think nothing of spending $250,000 on an Oscar party for his billion dollar clients.  That’s just the tip of the UTA hospitality expenditure iceberg.  Next time you see Jeremy’s grinning face in the Hollywood Reporter holding a basket ball next to a photo-op black boy ask yourself who is really benefiting from this public donation.

“This is a moment that demands our generosity, awareness and restlessness,” wrote UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer to staff. “Our world is a better place for the free exchange of artists, ideas and creative expression. If our nation ceases to be the place where artists the world over can come to express themselves freely, then we cease, in my opinion, to be America.”

As I’ve written before I sat most mornings with Jeremy for the best part of a decade at AA meetings all over Los Angeles.  At those AA meetings I saw the true face of Jeremy Zimmer.  The last time I sat with him at AA… the Palisades Bank 7am meeting, he told me never to come back to AA.  I wasn’t the only one.  I saw him bully many men of whom he didn’t approve… out of AA meetings.  He treats AA like his own personal cult. Understand how terrible that is… those men he made to feel unwelcome (less resilient than me) had no chances left to them.  At AA I heard Jeremy share misogynistic epithets and when things soured between us he was openly homophobic, casually racist.  When non famous black men came to our meeting out of rehab… from west end meetings, Jeremy did not sound like the man we saw yesterday embracing the rhetoric of inclusivity.  He would talk damningly about his wife and fat shame his daughter, his colleagues, his fellow agents.  When Lisa Hallerman left UTA he described her as a cancer… then wished she would die of cancer.

Zimmer joined agents, execs, assistants and other staffers from the Beverly Hills office to spend three hours at Heart of Los Angeles, an organization that provides programs in academics, arts and athletics to underserved youth. UTA has partnered with them in the past for holiday campaigns, employee volunteering and other charitable initiatives.

For all of Jeremy’s community out reach… how many black agents are there at UTA?  How many black execs are there at UTA?  How diverse is UTA?  Do his agents get diversity training or is sending them into the ‘community’ enough?

“As the Oscars draw the world’s attention to our country and our community, we must raise our voices loud and clear: The politics of fear and division do not reflect who we are as a nation, and united we can do better,” said Jeremy Zimmer, CEO of United Talent Agency.

A friend of mine, crewing a new feature asked UTA’s below the line for an inclusive (woman and poc) list for hiring consideration.  The assistant sneered, “Good luck with that.”

It’s ironic to those who know him that he has taken against Trump so badly.  For those who know both of them… they are almost identical.  Jeremy is thin-skinned and vindictive, a spiteful bully riven by alcoholic resentment.  Trump is a dry drunk. Jeremy is like Trump and vice versa.  As for Jeremy’s nascent activism?  As thrilled as the ACLU must be, why didn’t Zimmer step up to the plate sooner?  Why wasn’t he demonstrating and making dramatic flourishes whist Obama was busily deporting millions?  Why didn’t he confront Obama about his silencing of truth tellers? Why didn’t he say anything about for profit prisons or the lamentable ACA?

At his heart Jeremy can’t stand that somebody like Trump has gotten to be president, someone so incredibly similar to Jeremy Zimmer.

Categories
Gay Queer

Not Like You – Milo Yiannopoulos?

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Milo Yiannopoulos is a loathsome proto fascist.  A disruptor, a camp agitator.  To the gays, he is our familiar. We all know men like Milo.  When gay men are together… in private, competing for attention, without the prying female gaze, without the heterosexual male laughing like a hyena at things he can only guess are funny, men like Milo reveal themselves.

Milo is the club bitch, the bar cunt, the gym queen… who, without introduction or provocation will dismember you with a single word. He will not hesitate to identify and mercilessly herald to anyone who will listen your most tender vulnerability what ever it may be.  He is the gay guy who unrelentingly critiques your clothes, your teeth, your abs… and worst of all?  He is every gay man I know.  He is inexorably cruel.  Straight people think caustic homosexuals, diluted for mass consumption, are funny and unique.

Successful gay male entertainers like Dan Savage, Graham Norton and Alan Carr delight heterosexuals with their cutting jibes, a crippling aside masked with a cheeky grin… and the genesis of their humor?  Self-defense. Ironically, these skills are honed to protect ourselves from each other, from other gays, the queens, from men like Milo.  From you and me.

Do you remember the first queen you ever met? How exotic and frightening they were? Sitting at the bar.  How they crossed their legs, sipped their cocktail, do you remember how they looked at you?  

Milo, Hamish Bowles and I are all from the same cathedral city (and there about) of Canterbury in Kent, England.  Until Milo pitched his tent in the USA I never expected a gay man like him to get any traction.  I mean, have you heard him?  How could anyone take him seriously?  He’s a fool… but his campy insurrection and anti politically correct message were enthusiastically embraced by the Alt Right. Now, like some swishy Pines faggot bowling down Fire Island Boulevard high on meth, talking loudly to himself… he has leapt from the gay swamp into our consciousness.

Yesterday, however, an old radio interview surfaced in which Milo was accused, by his liberal detractors, of condoning child rape.  Listening to the interview it became obvious to me that he was describing, albeit in his usual flamboyant, incendiary way, a very common experience for many gay teens.  Overwhelmed with hormones and hornyness, unable to have sexual contact with our peers… he confessed as a boy he had consensual sex with men.

Milo perfectly described my experience as a gay teen and I’m sure we share this formative experience with many thousands of other gay men.  I was sexually voracious, just like most teen boys but without any kind of outlet.  Comforting myself with a cocktail of shame and confusion.  Remember, when I was born… homosexuality was illegal.  Like millions of others I was… born a criminal.  I came out at 13.  Making criminal sex choices as a young boy seemed perfectly understandable.  What choice did I have?  Only recently have people like me been pardoned by our government for being gay, and those who suffered in prison their records expunged.

Since Milo’s implosion the gay liberal media have kept extraordinarily quiet. It was easy to condemn Milo for hating on the trans, not so easy to shame him for his first time. What will happen if they tell their story of the older man who showed them the way? They might end up like Milo.

On Facebook, defending my own experience as a gay teen fucking men in their 30’s I was attacked by a straight women radio commentator and several straight men who refused to acknowledge that my sexperience is vastly difference from theirs.  They insisted I had been preyed upon by pedophiles.  They felt ‘sad’ that I didn’t understand I was a ‘victim’. They implied that unless I condemned the men I had sex with I colluded with all pedophiles.  They were looking for an angle to bring me down. One of them called me a ‘narcissistic fag’.  “If you are not a victim then you are a perpetrator,” they said.  When I defended myself they told me how angry I was and how I should get help.  Yeah, I thought… I’ve been seeking help for years to get over the trauma of being mercilessly bullied by straight people and their stringent anti gay laws. Who wouldn’t be angry if every time they held their lover’s hand in the street they risked a fatal blow?

I fought with ‘film maker’ Alexandra Billington and some dick called Ed Jones.  I said:

You would like to conflate the experience of heterosexuals with homosexuals but you are wrong and the moment you understand you are dead wrong you can get off your high horse and apologize to the thousands of gay people you’ve just insulted.

As I said, me seeking out and fucking a 30-year-old when I was 13 because I was sexually isolated is not the same as a 30-year-old man grooming and fucking a 13-year-old girl. As much as you want it to be.

I’ll tell you the help I need. I need men like you to stop telling me what my experience of being gay is like. If I need help with my anger then it’s because people like you have tortured me all my life with your heteronormativity.

Alexandra Billington I suppose only characters in movies are rageful?  Don’t you understand… you’re surrounded by people who are full of rage which is why we have Brexit and Trump. I don’t understand why you are not full of rage?  You should be on the streets fighting austerity but you’re at home criticizing other people’s sexual history on Facebook. I can’t imagine how dull your films must be.

Hasan Piker from The Young Turks seemed overjoyed that Milo had lost his book contract, his speaking engagements and his credibility.  Yet Milo lost everything for the least incendiary of any of his bitchy comments.   Of all the dumb things Milo has said, of all the cruel and meaningless attacks on trans, women and people of color… he loses his book deal describing an experience he possibly shares with millions of other gay men.

Categories
Queer

Junta

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1.

What would you say if I bought an orange kitchen?  Tangerine or blood orange?  I’m very excited.  The house is full of light reflected from the snowy lawns.  There are huge icicles hanging from the gutters.  Everything is melting.  Everything is dripping.  The stoop, partially renovated, is covered with a blue plastic tarpaulin. I make porridge and coffee every day after I make my bed.  I use raw milk from Churchtown Dairy, Abby Rockefeller’s Linlithgow farm designed by Rick Anderson.  Sometimes I find myself wearing both pairs of reading glasses and a woolen hat and scarf inside.  Dude hates the snow, The Little Dog loves it.

Most days I eat lunch at Murray’s on Broadway.  The women who writes the menu is very creative. Yesterday I ate mofongo, a Puerto Rican dish usually made with plantain but cook improvised, replacing the plantain with sweet potato.   A big ball of crushed sweet potato, bacon and garlic sitting in a bowl of chicken soup.  Fragrant.

There are a few dishes I cook all the time.  I don’t mind cooking for myself.  I like one particular dish, I cooked it last night.  Chicken thighs with white beans.  I threw it together years ago.  Perfect for a chilly night spent at home.

Pre heat the oven to 350 degrees.  Using a heavy bottomed casserole with a well-fitting lid melt butter into hot olive oil over a medium flame.  Add well seasoned chicken thighs to the casserole and fry until golden on both sides.  Remove thighs from pan and reserve.  Add bacon to the oil and butter, fry for 3 minutes then add one finely chopped leek, one chopped onion, two stalks of chopped celery and 3 crushed cloves of garlic.  Saute vegetables until translucent.  Add salt and pepper, bay leaf, the reserved chicken and one tin of white beans or beans you have soaked over night, I use Barlotti beans but any bean will do. Barely submerge ingredients with equal measures of good, home-made chicken stock and white wine.  Bring to the boil, cover, then bake in the oven for 70 minutes.  Serve with sautéed spinach or cauliflower cheese.

2.

At Trump’s behest, immigration raids sweep further and deeper into our rural and urban immigrant communities. Friends remind me these raids happened discreetly the past 8 years.  Obama deported millions. To Obama’s shame he deported more undocumented workers than any president before him. He scored no points by doing so with the republicans whose approval he so desperately sought.  Unlike Obama, who encouraged ICE agents to focus on less sympathetic groups, Trump’s ICE directive has no such qualms. Agents are knocking on multiple doors in immigrant communities demanding papers. There are checkpoints on busy roads. They take anyone who cannot prove they have a right to be in the USA.

People vanish into the system.  People vanished in Chile or Argentina, after the coup. Bodies appearing years later in unmarked, mass graves.  Meanwhile, the elderly dictator lives elsewhere in luxurious accommodation… claiming he is innocent of crimes against humanity.  This is how it begins.

Nobody really seems prepared. Everyone thinks the ACLU are going to save the USA.  The courts put an end to the ‘Muslim Ban’ but border officials ignore the court.  People.  This is what a right-wing revolution looks like. The dictator and his trusted generals. This fledgling third world junta.

For the time being you may not notice any real difference. Resistance may mean… adding to the chorus of outraged voices on social media about this trump abomination and that executive order but mostly your circumstances will not change.  

Today is just like any other day… last month, last year, the year before that.  There’s food in the store, the train runs on time, the sewers are functioning.  The big difference for most of us are the stories currently captivating us. The daily drama, each report more outrageous than the next.  The cast of new characters.  The crazy president who you, yes you… you think he’s going to be impeached. You hanker for his removal, you pray his corruption, his lies, his business deals, his baddest badness will get him removed from office… but he’s not going anywhere.  He’s staying put.  The impeach Trump story line is just another red herring designed to engage and disillusion those who hate/love Trump.

My friends are panicked, but I say: don’t worry affluent white friends. You’ll be the last ones to suffer.  Trump is creating this alt right paradise just for you! A brand new Eden made of paper trees and wax fruit for compliant white folk… and believe me, you will comply. This is what it must have been like in Germany… when they started raiding Jewish neighborhoods. But nobody believed it. Nobody really cared… because they were just rounding up illegals, Mexicans. Oh… I mean Jews. Then one day you faint because the gardener cuts his thumb the next you are crawling over a mountain of corpses.

Categories
Gay politics Queer Rant

Civil War

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1.

Acting as an English aristocrat during my formative years I would meet men and women of the British upper class who openly sympathised with Hitler and fascism. So it was I met the original alt right British leader Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana the year before he died in 1980. His mind riven by dementia.

We were invited for lunch, Charlotte Mosley (their daughter in law) and me. In the car to Orsay, Charlotte warned Oswald might mention his belief the British people were still eagerly awaiting his inevitable return to power and I should ignore his delusion if he shared it with us.

When we arrived, Diana Mosley (a dedicated Nazi) was overwhelmed… lunch was canceled because Oswald had taken a shit in the dining room.

2.

“Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than the good bourgeois order.”

Ernst Röhm, the openly gay founder of the Nazi party.

A young gay fascist, UK born Milo Yiannopoulos has stolen America’s alt right heart. Milo reminds me of another gay man, Ernst Rohm who ‘discovered’ and groomed Adolf Hitler. Röhm ran the thuggish SA, the precursor to the highly effective SS.  Hitler initially protected Röhm from other elements of the Nazi Party who held his homosexuality in violation of the party’s anti-homosexual policy.  However, Hitler later changed his mind fearing Röhm a potential threat to his power. Ernst Röhm was executed by his formerly close friend Adolf Hitler during the Night of the Long Knives.

Like the SA before, the Waffen-SS offered sanctuary to a large number of closeted and not so closeted gay men… (think gay priests hiding out in the catholic church), gay men in the SS were protected from the more rigorous Gestapo. Consequently the SS gays arrested the dykes, the pansies and the trans and put them into concentration camps where they were experimented on: castrated, filled with water like balloons until they exploded.

Kissing, mutual masturbation and love-letters between men served as a legitimate reason for the police to make an arrest.

Gay men suffered unusually cruel treatment in the concentration camps. They faced persecution not only from German soldiers but Jewish men and women would beat them too, many gay men were beaten to death by other inmates. The SS were known to use gay men for target practice, aiming at the pink triangles their victims were forced to wear.

Are Milo Yiannopoulos’s views abhorrent to me? No. I think he’s a clown, Trump’s gay jester who The Donald uses as evidence of non discrimination.  Does he deserve to be silenced?  No. At present, Milo lives on the super fuel liberal censorship affords him. As Trump’s power increases Milo’s influence will become a nuisance to the alt right.  Milo’s campery will prove too much for macho fascists. As Trump’s alt right message becomes purer and more distilled Milo will be dispensed with. Like Ernst Röhm, he will become a liability.  

At that time… the civil war will be well underway. Milo will vanish, added to the vast pile of bodies I see before me.

Milo referred to Donald Trump as ‘daddy’. It is maybe the first time I’ve heard my own particular bent described so efficiently, so eloquently and with so much erotic charge.

3.

For thirty years gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement. With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe have been gay. Fascism isn’t a nasty heterosexual habit, it is a gay thing… and it’s time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and stop smelling the amyl nitrate.

Germany’s leading neo-Nazi during the 1980’s, Michael Kuhnen died of AIDS a few years after coming out. Martin Lee, author of A Study of European Fascism, explains, “For Kuhnen, there was something super-macho about being a Nazi, as well as being gay, both of which enforced his sense of belonging to an elite. He told a West German journalist homosexuals were ‘especially well-suited for our task, because they do not want ties to wife, children and family.’”

Whenever I mention gay nazis to liberal gay men they become outraged. It is beyond their comprehension. They call me a liar and a fraud.

Now all I have to say is: Milo Yiannopoulos and they shut the fuck up.

4.

My Trump prognosis?  I predict a short, violent civil war with a million or so casualties.  I can hear my friends scoffing, but they scoffed when I said Trump would be elected. I’ll say again: civil war is inevitable.  Rather than ignore this inevitability… we must accept a terrible truth: it is perfectly normal, when ideas become entrenched, for opposing humans in the same tribe to start afresh elsewhere or fight each other to the death.  Nowadays, there’s nowhere to emigrate, we are stuck with our enemies.  

At first, those who disagree with Trump will be silenced… then they will disappear. After a year or so of vengeful President Trump, random acts of violence shamelessly executed in broad day light will be ignored by those who formerly thought themselves brave. Recording these bloody incidents will result in immediate arrest and indefinite detention.  As the numbers of dissidents swell, camps to house them will be built. Our ‘liberal’ society will quickly absorb fascism. Fearful of losing their jobs, their bank accounts, their social media… the people will swiftly acquiesce. They will feel safe once more, hemmed in by new laws written to restrict discredited ‘freedom’.  The police will be fair but feared. We will once again enjoy apartheid and those who rock the boat will vanish.

5.

Finally, don’t be fooled by the black faces at the Oscars this year. One diverse year will not make up for the past 40. Where are the women directors? Where are the black producers/studio execs/agents/managers?  Follow the real money in Hollywood, the fancy mansions, yachts, private airplanes and it leads to one place… white men. Every agency, studio head, management companies and most production companies are owned and run by mostly white jewish men. They have excluded black faces and women from the money, the power and prestige.